Texas coming up on Tuesday. On the Republican side, the big enchilada is the Senate primary, where David Dewhurst seems likely to get into a runoff with Ted Cruz, unless Tom Leppert comes from behind and pulls off a second-place finish. Other Republican primaries to watch are the open TX-14 and newly-Republican TX-25 and TX-36. The Democrats have primaries in TX-23 and the newly-Democratic TX-33 and TX-34 (protip: don't pick the indicted DA in the latter).

Dewhurst is definitely going into a runoff by dint of those pathetic ads he's running on China and immigration. Incumbents (or quasi-incumbents in his case) don't throw the kitchen sink unless they're panicking.

Some weird results in the House primaries. Steve Stockman, former one-term Congressman, is leading the pack in TX-36 with 27% despite raising nearly no money. Surely he can't have that much residual name recognition?

Also, I thought Michael Williams was supposed to be a big up-and-comer. He's currently at 5% in TX-25, behind five other candidates.

Speaking of AR-04, it turns out that one of the people vying to lose to Cotton in November is my half-third-cousin-once-removed. That is, my great-great-great-grandfather is his great-great-grandfather, but we are descended from him through different women (as my ggg-grandmother died and our mutual ancestor remarried).

In any case, here's a map of the results, because why the heck not:

Gene Jeffress is in red; my cousin Q. Byrum Hurst is in blue; and DC Morrison is in green. Jeffress's strongest area of support is in what is presumably his State Senate district. Hurst is strongest around where he grew up (and where our mutual ancestor settled), Hot Springs in Garland County. His dad was apparently a State Senator in the area, and was sort of a big deal (or, at least, was WikiNotable).

The race is essentially all but over, as Jeffress has wrapped up the support of DC Morrison, while Hurst seems to be suffering from some financialmismanagement. Still exciting to learn about, though! Not very many of my distant cousins have been notable enough to deserve Wikipedia articles.

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Chief Judicial Officer of the Most Serene Republic of the Midwest, registered in the State of Joy, in AtlasiaRecognized National Treasure of Atlasia

The 67-year-old Reyes was first elected to Congress in 1996. Reyes received a rare primary endorsement last month from President Barack Obama. The 39-year-old O’Rourke is an El Paso native who says he favors legalizing marijuana but wouldn’t push for that in Congress.

Obviously, only races that not only were interesting (winner has at least a chance of getting to Congress) but also map interestingly (no one or two county districts.)

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If I'm shown as having been active here recently it's either because I've been using the gallery, because I've been using the search engine looking up something from way back, or because I've been reading the most excellent UK by-elections thread again.